


When you hear screaming in the night...

by fish__gillls



Category: Don't Hug Me I'm Scared (Webseries)
Genre: Frogs, Gen, Plants, but i'm gonna get there eventually, frog singular though, shrignold is there for all of three seconds, tagging on this website is intimidating, yeah... that's about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 08:04:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20327821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fish__gillls/pseuds/fish__gillls
Summary: ...you probably shouldn't go after it.Then again, when your begrudging companion says it's just a frog, and this begrudging companion knows a whole lot more about animals than you do, then there's probably no harm in it.aka, Colin finds a frog for the first time and Gilbert exudes a general air of disappointment. And it's two in the morning. And Shrignold is done with everything.





	When you hear screaming in the night...

It was late at night. The crescent of the moon and the pinpricks of the stars were smothered by tendrils of dark clouds, each of which seemed to want to embrace the sky, and the forest appeared as more of the same: a swathe of tendrils, tangled and knotted together, obscuring the ground from sight. The nearer open expanse of grass and the occasional tufts of weeds were swayed by the wind, sometimes into a frenzy, sometimes into a slow dance, and the nocturnal wildlife seemed to have been frozen by the air's cold touch.

The study was a refuge against the cold. The fireplace was lit. The light was on. Everything felt soft and golden and warm, ranging from old, crumbling novels to the clay pots housing ferns and flowers and various other less distinguishable flora. Warm red bromeliads bloomed beside the bookshelf and warm yellow daffodils, at flowering in the first gentle movements of spring, sprouted happily on the cabinet. The wind sang against the pane but nothing within felt its cold.

And, to top it all off, there was screaming from outside the window.

It was high-pitched, wailing and hoarse, fading from a low croak to a squeal in a matter of moments. It had been going on for five minutes. Neither of the men in the room had given any indication of caring. Colin, the one who had bleached his hair white once and figured he was obligated to keep doing it, continued twirling a few strands of silk-white hair around his finger while staring down at the table, either lost in thought or having no thoughts at all. Gilbert, the one who had insisted on littering the place with more plants than you'd find in a garden centre, continued idly flicking through a novel, picking out words at random before moving on at a languid pace. A dried leaf or petal would sometimes slip from between the pages and float to the ground.

The screaming persisted. It sounded like a child, or a cat, or some devil incarnate, cowering beneath the window and making a hell of a racket to boot. Hell, it could have been all of the above. It would have been nice if it had just gone away.

It didn't.

Colin's gaze eventually faltered and, with a sigh, he turned to the window, slinging an arm over the back of his chair. "Who the hell invited Satan?"

Gilbert scoffed. "Tony, probably."

It was a topic of discourse everywhere but in the study, where the popular opinion had always been that Tony had a stick up his ass and shouldn't be trusted with anything more personal than a 'hello'. Colin shrugged, nonchalant, and began twisting the cuff of his shirt this way and that. It was stained with yellow paint. Bob Ross just did that to you. Bob Ross did not unleash ghastly screams in the early hours of the day.

The wailing continued like some disembodied air raid siren.

"No, seriously," Colin said, a touch quieter, "what the fuck is that? Did somebody throw their kid over here or somethin'?"

Gilbert paused, both thumbs keeping his position in the novel. He wasn't actually reading it but the action was instinctual by now, even if no part of him had concentrated on picking up more than a word or two per chapter, and shutting the book now would give away his lack of focus. He was tired. It was late and he was only staying up because Colin had been reluctant to go to bed.

Shrugging, Gilbert opened the book again, skimming down the unusually clean margins for the usual, although suddenly absent, notes. "Probably just a frog," he murmured.

"A... Frog?" Colin asked. He was trying not to look confused; he was failing miserably.

"Well, it's not a fucking fox, is it? Not here."

Although those also screamed. Animals, as Colin had slowly learned, were very good at making a wide range of sounds, ranging from awkward to the screams of hell. Gilbert didn't mind this variety of noise. Colin did. It was a wonder the two men got on at all, really, what with having either complete opposite opinions or engaging in Devil's advocate when they didn't.

After a moment of thought, Colin stood, set his cuff into place and wandered towards the window with a casual air. Gilbert watched him over the pages of his book- not outright staring, but looking up for a few seconds at a time and inwardly giving up a little more at Colin's every meandering step.

"It's not illegal to see what it is for yourself, dumbass," Gilbert said at length, Colin having completed about three consecutive loops by then. He looked like he was aiming for a fourth.

"It's not illegal to get off your ass, either."

"It's a fucking frog, Colin. What am I meant to do about it? Tell it to go away?"

"You could just fucking murder it, at this point," Colin muttered, finally finding himself in a position where he could reach for and fiddle with the window's handle, swear about it always being locked, and turn to find the damned key. It would inevitably be on a shelf somewhere, most likely presided over by a leafy plant overlord. "I know you're not Snow White but there's no point being a piece of shit about all of this, yeah? You know fully well that this house is fucked."

Gilbert exhaled slowly, shutting the book with a thud that scared him more than it did Colin. A few more startled petals began their slow descent to the floorboards. "It's a frog. That's it. There's no mystery or fucking... I don't know what, about it."

Colin replied, in his usual stubborn way: "We don't know it's a frog until we see it."

"It's a frog." The word 'frog' was beginning to sound funny. The whole situation was also funny in the way you called bad luck funny, and only because it was Colin doing something pointless. That was a tendency of his. Colin severely lacked in common sense, which was why he had been lumped in with the other idiot with absolutely no common sense, whose name began with 'G' and ended with 'ilbert.'

Colin, after a few moments of searching and muttering, inserted the little rusted key into the lock and opened the window with a huff, freezing up as both the cold air and the screaming hit him at once. He swore and leaned over the window sill. "I can't see anything."

"Unless you have night vision to replace the brain that's meant to be in your skull, I'm not surprised."

Despite himself, Gilbert abandoned his book entirely and turned to find a torch amid the general clutter of his cabinet- which, of course, meant playing with the handle of the glorified wooden box for a good ten seconds first. Everything in the study had not only a rustic air but also the troubles of relying on old furniture.

Colin, on the other hand, kept staring down at the myriad of grasses clustered near the wall, just below the window. A few young dandelions, outlined in brilliant gold by the light leaking out from the study, swayed in the night air, and white clover speckled the ground like little shards of fallen stars. These were mostly obscured by shadow- as above, so below, or at least that was the saying that felt apt. Flecks of dandelion fluff twitched and leapt from blade to blade, forever trapped by small hairs or sharp edges. Somewhere among the scattered seeds and flowers there apparently sat a little frog who was screaming its dear old lungs out. It was hard to believe. Rather, it would have been hard to believe if not for the general state of calamity the members of the house endured.

Something hit the back of Colin's head, hard, and Colin swore. It was the one sound that had managed to rise above the shrill wails.

"Torch," Gilbert explained, a tad late, and Colin turned just in time to see the shadow of a smile fading from the man's face.

"Fuck you." Colin stooped down to grab the old thing regardless.

"You're welcome."

Colin would have loved to retaliate. Unfortunately, he needed the torch and he had nothing within reach that he could throw. He wasn't up to picking up a frog, either.

With one swift motion, Colin jumped over the windowsill and found himself outside. Hindsight said that he should have brought a coat. Maybe some earplugs. Between the chill biting his skin, his hair being thrown in his face and the screaming of the damned piercing his eardrums, it was no surprise that his hands shuddered as he tried to turn the torch on. He succeeded after a few attempts and shook the old thing as if it would help brighten its meagre beam of light. He would have to hunt for some batteries at some point because Gilbert wasn't going to.

The little thicket of grass and weeds yielded nothing but bright strands of green layered over harsh black shadow. A few white dandelions shook off the last of their fluff. A stem or two of grass trembled. Colin squinted, pushing his glasses further up his nose and then abandoning them altogether, but could see nothing aside from... Well, plants, Gilbert's second favourite hobby, kept from first by the art of fucking around with poisons.

"Get over here, motherfucker!" Colin called through the window. It was a lie to say that he wasn't still staring intently at the cluster as if some small, fleeting shadow would reveal all, divine prophecy style.

Gilbert grumbled something back but, after a few moments, a chair scraped against the floor and the man's slow footsteps neared the window. "What? Are you scared to move some grass back?" he teased, then leaned over the windowsill and stared straight down, trying to make something out from the mass of mottled greens and yellows and whites. He had about as much success as Colin- that being, none at all. "Fucking hell, I think I preferred the crickets."

"I think we all did, mate," was Colin's distracted response.

Before Colin could say anything else: "Are you ready to come back in?"

Colin was used to it, he told himself, but even then a tremor of sheer rage went through him. Well, rage- sheer annoyance was a more suitable term. He pursed his lips and crouched to the ground, aiming the torch's light as deep into the tangled mess of stems and leaves as he could.

"I'm finding this damned frog," he said levelly.

Gilbert was sometimes fond of Colin. He was also sometimes fond of the smell of gasoline. This was not one of those times- for both scenarios. "It's the middle of the fucking night," he began, keeping his voice low and his sentences drawn-out as if he was speaking to a child, "and, as annoying as it is to the both of us, that frog-" How many times had he said 'frog' within the past ten minutes? "-is probably going to stay there and scream until whatever is annoying it stops annoying it. You're doing nothing more than aggravating it. Come inside and go to bed and leave the frog alone. It will be gone by the morning."

Colin, who was never particularly concerned about listening to Gilbert's opinions- although this backfired more than it helped- only gave a hum of acknowledgement. "What's pissing it off, though?"

"You."

"No, what was pissing it off before I came out here?"

Gilbert sighed and decided to lean on his elbows instead of on his hands, lowering his vantage point, and the amount he cared about what was happening, in the process. "Maybe it got stuck on a leaf or something," he offered blandly. "I don't know. I know fuck all about amphibians."

"You know fuck all about most things."

"So do you."

"Touche."

The men continued staring into the patch of grass and assorted flowers. If anybody had been nearby they would have assumed the duo were either drunk or deluded. Both would have been fair estimates. The wind calmed a little, turning into a soothing series of pushes and pulls, and the flurry of movement among the plants stilled, but only just. A denser section near the back continued to tremble.

"That's the frog," Gilbert murmured, more to himself than to Colin, but the latter nodded nonetheless.

"Are any of your foxglove still thriving back there?" Colin asked. It was a necessary precaution and one he wouldn't have had to take with literally anybody else within a hundred-mile radius.

"No," Gilbert said. "The worst you'd have gotten if they were still there is a rash, anyway, so I wouldn't worry about it. Just don't touch your eyes or mouth or anything."

Colin suppressed the urge to ask why Gilbert had planted them there in the first place. They had been there for about six months before Tony caught wind of it and jumped to the worst conclusions. Granted, they weren't the _wrong_ conclusions, but it would have been nice to have Tony and a few of the others out of operation for a little while. Still- foxglove? Right outside the study window? How much more suspect could Gilbert have been?

Slowly exhaling, his breath forming swirling clouds of mist just in front of his face, Colin reached forward and began pulling the mess of plantlife apart. A few dandelion seeds soared into the air, pulled and let down by a gentle breeze; a blade of grass scraped over Colin's hand and he hissed, recoiled, then realised what had happened and cursed Gilbert's quiet laughter just above him; finally, he was met with the brick wall of the building, preserved and sheltered by the dense growth of every annoyance known to the gardening world.

The screaming hitched and bubbled down to what sounded eerily like a kitten's first whines.

Colin asked, "Do you see it?" and didn't have to look up to guess the answer, his own eyes working as well as those of the other man.

"No. It might just be the lighting, though."

"If you had bothered to replace the batteries that would have never been an issue." Gilbert didn't respond and Colin sighed. "It's starting up again," he noted, eyes narrowing as the sound boiled to a kettle's whistle. "I might actually end up deaf after this shit."

"Don't be dramatic."

"Get down here and do this for me, then!"

Gilbert clucked his tongue but didn't seem up for an argument. "All you have to do is move your hands lower, Colin."

Colin did so, keeping his eyes fixed on Gilbert, and gave a smug grin when nothing appeared- no frog, no magical demon, nothing. "And? What now, genius?"

Gilbert bit back a sigh. "Is it to your left or to your right?"

"Is what-"

"The fucking screaming, Colin! What else?" and Gilbert didn't even get a chide for yelling right then, only because Colin had, in his own wonky estimation, better things to do.

Colin paused, waited, and shrugged. "It's in my fucking head, mate. It could be right above me and I would be none the wiser."

That did it. Gilbert vaguely gestured for Colin to move and jumped over the windowsill himself, a little more impervious to the cold than his begrudging companion. The torch's light had waned further, offering a dull afterglow of ochre for a functioning light, but Gilbert, like Colin, was nothing if not stubborn. He often wondered if he had managed to make Colin's perseverant streak worse with his own ways. He would then decide that, no, Colin made his own problems.

You would have to have had night vision to see anything. Nothing glistened, nothing shone, and Gilbert had the feeling that he was getting cut up by grass and various leaves more than he was getting anywhere. He also had the feeling that Colin had wandered off. Colin's presence was a heavy one, mainly because he insisted on looking over your shoulder, and it had faded into the night.

"Colin?" Gilbert said, not turning from his own quick investigation of the plants he should have cut back half a year ago. "Where have you gone?"

There was a vague 'here!' from somewhere behind him. "It's too fucking loud!"

Dramatic. That was one of many negative attributes Colin wore like the medals on a soldier's uniform. It rarely worked to anybody's favour.

Something glistened.

Gilbert almost glanced over it- almost- but the waning light was nothing if not atmospheric, and something shimmering dully in dim orange lighting had the tendency of drawing the eye. As if in confirmation, the wheezing drone hitched, and Gilbert found himself staring into the round, protruding eyes of a small frog.

"Found the bitch," he murmured, about a mile away from triumphant as the crow flies.

It was small. Too small to have been making such a racket. It lunged forward, gave a faint squeak and almost got tangled in the plantlife again in its bid for safety, its mottled skin overlayed by another muddied tint due to the rapidly dying torch.

"Colin," Gilbert yelled over his shoulder, "I found the fucking frog! Are you happy now?"

Gilbert almost expected for Colin to not come back. It had happened before. Colin would wander off somewhere and just... Keep walking. It was fine in the day, when the few trees scattered over the grassy expanse would be completely unable to hide the chemical-white splotch that was Colin, but in the night? Colin didn't dress to blend in but he would still manage to hide better than a ninja from some cheesy action movie.

Colin was, fortunately or otherwise, close enough to hear, trot closer and peer down at the now silent frog. It was quite passive- perhaps used to humans. Perhaps not registering either of them as human. Either way, there it sat, staring blankly into space and looking a little more than out of place.

"Oh. That is a frog," Colin breathed. The hint of childish awe in his voice meshed strangely with his flat tone, forming something that made Gilbert turn aside and pull a pained, bothered smile. "At least it's quiet now. Why was it being so loud earlier?"

"Got tangled, probably, or else decided that being loud is a fun thing to be." It was meant as a jab. It was taken as fact. Such was communication between the two of them. "Anyway," Gilbert announced, slowly getting to his feet, "let's hope the door is still unlocked at the ungodly hour of two in the morning. Going through the window with this mess-" He gestured at the flora as if it wasn't his fault. "-in the way would be fucking stupid."

"We've done it before," Colin pointed out.

"Yeah. You ended up face-flat on the floor."

Colin hummed. He had knelt on the grass in front of the frog and was watching it as intently as he could through the darkness.

"Colin?" Gilbert said, an edge of tiredness just about making itself prominent for the first time that evening.

"Yeah?"

"If you pick it up I cannot promise to be merciful."

"I wasn't going to, you fucking bitch!" A pause. Gilbert turned off the torch and opened the battery compartment, already pulling the batteries free before he forgot to do so later. "I wanna poke it," Colin breathed.

Gilbert halted. "Colin, for the love of all hell, it's late. Early. Whatever. This is not the time to be harassing frogs."

"I wanna."

"It's going to scream bloody murder and you are going to regret it thoroughly."

Colin was not budging. He didn't appear to be trying to follow through with his plans, either, leaving Gilbert to shift his gaze away from the man's silhouette and wonder why he even bothered anymore. The frog, on the other hand, seemed quite content with its lot in life, placing another sure hop between itself and the mess of plantlife it must have viewed as a jungle.

"Do you want me to pick the frog up for you?" Gilbert asked at length. He was tired. He was done with the day, let alone with Colin, and picking up a frog was pretty far down his list of things to avoid.

"Yeah." It was accompanied by a single nod. A child. Colin was a child. At two in the morning, he was nothing more than a little boy who had just seen a frog and now wanted to prod it with a stick. Gilbert was really, really considering the feat of asking Tony if he could leave for a month or so, even if the holiday would inevitably be cut short by the man he would be openly avoiding.

Gilbert knelt beside the said man and glanced at him from the corner of his eye. "If it starts screaming, it's not my fault. It's yours. Understood?"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. The usual." And the usual had never come close to being normal.

***

Shrignold was not one for staying out so late. However, business with his people often meant he played roles that took some time. This time around, he had been kept back several hours by an infight, and he had been on the brink of rebelling himself by the time the dichotomy had settled into placid indifference.

He made his way up the hill, hands in his pockets, eyes fixed on the ground, the path he was taking back to the house instinctual. He had taken it every day for a decade. Over that amount of time, he had managed to carve out a faint trail for himself, one lined with small, shimmering stones and a few broken shards of geodes. Each glimmered under the moonlight until those pale rays were obscured by clouds, at which point the path once more faded into memory.

The night was quiet. Peaceful. Soothing, even, after listening to so many raised voices and having to raise his own. Shrignold was not one to appreciate the night but, that night and that night alone, he could glance up into the wreaths of dark clouds and the smattering of pale stars and be thankful for it. It was easy on the eyes, on the ears, on the mind.

Then, something started screaming.

Shrignold paused, perplexed, his heart unsure of whether to stay in his chest or to stick in his throat. Was that a child? No- it was hoarse, croaking, like some animal. It was coming from the direction of the house.

He made a small circle, little more than a turn, and decided it was none of his business. He was tired and his back hurt and his eyes were longing to close. Animals screamed all of the time, and none did it better than humans. Chances were that something had gotten trapped or was dying a slow, painful death somewhere just out of sight, a cry being all that remained of its presence on the Earth.

That was a bit morbid. Especially for Shrignold.

Plus, the whine kept fading in and out, in and out, like a fluctuating radio signal. If the animal had been dying it would have been dead by the time Shrignold had taken another ten paces forward. Those ten paces had passed ten paces ago.

A little further on and Shrignold could hear voices. Two of them. Male. One was laughing, high-pitched and child-like ("Why does it look so surprised? Yes, I poked you, you fucking devil!"), and the other seemed like the begrudging father of the duo. The piercing whine came from that general direction. Shrignold shuddered at the thought of two of the people he shared a house with torturing an animal, then told himself that there were worse things they could have been doing. There were worse things that they had done.

Shrignold crested the hill and stood at the top, disorientated for a moment by the sight of two shadows near the study window. Gilbert and Colin, then- and if the positioning hadn't given it away then the looks would have sufficed, the light from the window offering just enough of a glow to pick out Gilbert's long hair and Colin's white, narrow face. Colin hadn't seen him; Gilbert had his back turned. The whining was coming exactly from their direction. Shrignold, although not surprised, couldn't help but roll his eyes and retrace his steps, deciding to come around to the front of the house using a path lower down. He didn't need to be seen at two in the morning, especially by those two.

Although Shrignold did, out of curiousity, shift higher up the hill for a moment to see what in God's name they were doing at such a late hour. He had to squint to see that Gilbert was holding something. He had to squint even more, his eyes aching and watering, to figure out that it was some sort of small animal. A frog? Where had they gotten a frog from? Was there a pond nearby?

Oh, well. Not the weirdest thing the two of them had done at night by far. Once, Shrignold had sauntered past and almost received a heavy blow to the head from a baseball bat, all because neither of the men understood a- what it meant to be adults- and b- that the line between play and outright violence existed, let alone where that line lay.

For instance, Gilbert genuinely seemed to believe that poisoning people was a fun, friendly hobby, and Colin was not a stranger to casually electrocuting people.

Shrignold had been on the receiving end of both.

And people wondered why he preferred his cult.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for any errors involving word use or commas or what have you. Or tagging. Jesus Christ, tagging things is so much less stressful on Wattpad or Quotev or wherever.  
Anyway, I've been watching those frog screaming compilations recently against my better judgement. And a whole lot of Bob Ross.  
And there is criminally little content for these two- or any characters from this show, really- being complete idiots, unless I'm overlooking a few things. In which case, please. Send them to me.  
I hope my sentences didn't get too long.


End file.
